I don’t suppose I’ll be travelling with P&O any time soon after they sacked all their 800 British workers on the spot via a recorded Zoom message, got a small army of balaclava-wearing heavies to physically evict the sacked workers from their ships and recruit cheap foreign labour (believed to be Columbian), who were already waiting at the various quaysides, to replace them. As the Daily Mail ‘journalist’ Dan Hodges put it, “Not entirely sure that’s what Brexit was supposed to be delivering.” I suppose that since a broken clock is right twice a day we should be grateful that Hodges is right with this. But in terms of softening up and weakening workers’ rights, that’s one of the main things Brexit was about.
Transport secretary Bell End Grant Shapps was soon on the case, tweeting: “I am very concerned about the news from P&O Ferries this morning and we will be speaking to the company today to understand the impact on workers and passengers.” He continued: “Important to note other operators continue to run cross Channel routes, so passengers and goods can flow, but I am working with the Kent Resilience Forum to minimise disruption.” This is what is known as a holding response, meaning that he has no idea what to do but hopefully a quick cuppa and a Rich Tea with the company will sort things out. Help Shapps “understand the impact on workers and passengers?” For Christ’s sake, Grant: I can put this in plain language. The impact on workers is that they won’t be working anymore and the impact on passengers will mainly be of inconvenience and added stress.
Although the workers only found out today, P&O have been planning, probably for some time. It won’t have been a quick job to recruit hundreds of Columbians and bring them to the UK. They appear to have recruited security staff – make that bouncers – to kick the men off their ships. The planning and preparation of this sordid, squalid attack on its own workers didn’t happen as a result of someone’s whim. It’s been carefully planned.
I’m very much a union man so it’s worth noting that the sacked workers all belong to the RMT union. Although trade unions, and thus working people, have seen their influences wane as a result of constant attacks by Conservative governments, the RMT is a relatively powerful organisation. And it appears that P&O has simply trampled all over it and sacked everyone, regardless of what the workers, the union and even the government think. Meanwhile, the workers who woke up today with what they thought were good, secure jobs go to bed tonight unemployed. Put yourself in their place. And now let’s look at the elephant in the room: Brexit.
It would take all day to explain this so I’ll keep it brief. We left the EU with a terrible trade deal. UK exports to the EU are down by 20%. That’s a lot of fees and a lot of tickets. Having left the single market and customs union, everything takes longer and costs more. It now takes many hours to get through passport control at Dover and ordinary passenger footfall has almost dried up altogether. And there’s more.
Jacob Rees Mogg, the stupid man’s idea of what a clever man looks like, promised that Brexit would deliver Indian levels of safety and workers’ rights and the P&O scandal already shows that to be true. And the Vote Leavers favourite economist Sir Patrick Minford said that Brexit would kill exports and he was right. He was in favour of Brexit. Work that one out. But things will soon get even worse.
Britain still hasn’t put its full post Brexit border in place. Once we do, adding further delays and costs, we’ll be dreaming of the good old days when inflation was ONLY 9%. The coming full hard Brexit is likely to send it to 15%+. And that, my loyal reader, is called Taking Back Control. So, the disgraceful actions of P&O are what we really voted for in 2016. If you’re a P&O worker who voted to Leave Europe, you will, as one keen observer noted, get over it, as your pals wittily informed us ‘remoaners’ when Britain voted to leave Europe. A major goal of Brexit was to get rid of EU employment protection laws. What goes around comes around, eh?
None of this will bring back the jobs to the P&O ferries, where even an organised workforce was powerless to fight back.
This is the world dreamed about by not just the Rees Moggs of this world, but also the Faragistas of the hard right. (I omit Boris Johnson because he only campaigned for Brexit because it suited his personal ambitions. If he thought remaining in the EU would have benefitted him more, he’d have led that campaign.) The forces of capitalism unleashed, regulation abolished, the market will determine everything. Ordinary people feature nowhere in this calculation, but they never did. It was only their job to vote it through back in 2016. And that’s where today’s P&O announcement began.
